No notable upsides in comparison to One-handed axe (the speed is a lie, they’re roughly equal)
One-handed axe is already quite a weak weapon, is the Crowbill just pepega tier trash then? What’s even up with the Crowbill anyways? When was the last time you saw it? When was the last time it received any changes to it?
Off Topic, but man the axes and Crowbill really just need a little bit more cleave. Giving them enough cleave to hit 2 Chaos Raiders would help immensely. Otherwise you’d have to make them obscenely strong at killing single targets to make them worthwhile.
To add the angles on the crowbill are awful. Axe isn’t painful to use because it’s moveset is all diagonal and overhead chops. But flat horizontal swings make zero sense on a weapon with zero cleave.
For the last few days that I’ve been playing, I’ve been exclusively using it with Battle Wizard (yes lol) with Volcanic Fireball, and I love it. Visually it’s very pleasing, it has a very nice inspect animation, cool, unique moveset, Sienna 1h sword stance instead of the virgin fire sword hunchback, and it has a unique sound when hitting things, which all feels very nice. Problem is, it’s trash gameplay wise, and quite possible the worst weapon to take with BW in the game. But hey, I still top scoreboards and beat Moonbow SotT’s in Cata QP from time to time.
It feels like this is the invisible weapon of the game. I can’t remember the last time anyone’s talked about it, mentioned it or using it. Fatshark themselves forgot it existed, it received none of the buffs 1h axes did, despite being almost the same weapon. It didn’t even get the damage buff that 1h axes did. I am quite possibly the first person to use crowbill with BW post-WoM. But damn does the weapon feel badass.
Honestly, the angles aren’t actually bad. Light attacks consist of a straight overhead, 2 diagonal downwards swings, and a punch - all of which are actually good for headshotting. While I ragged on the heavy attacks and their poor swing directions, they’re actually solid. Stormvermin are hunchbacked in away that actually makes it feasible to headshot with, while against Maulers you wouldn’t want to headshot anyways. Chaos Warriors are so bulky that getting headshots is difficult anyways, so it’s good to just embrace the bodyshots with heavies.
Big problem with it is the tHP. With my BW build I get almost nothing. I’ve actually found that Stagger tHP is almost serviceable with a Sister on the team - it gives a surprising amount for staggering single targets. On kill is pretty weak (and especially useless on BW), unless you’re really getting those kills with something like Unchained (oh wait, it doesn’t have it, lmao). On crit/headshot is pretty garbage, and none of Sienna’s careers have it, and cleave is self explanatory. This actually does leave stagger as the best option for it. Man, it’s almost like we could use some sort of Stagger rebalance mod added to the game.
I use the crowbill exclusively on pyro and unchained (along with fireball) and it is great. Would not mind some cleave buffs though as it can be a bit unwieldy in the thick of a horde (but atm i compensate by spamming fireballs in between strikes).
A bit hard to understand what exactly “top tier” means when it doesn’t really compete with weapons like flamesword, flail, dagger or normal sword on those careers. Basically the whole rest of Sienna’s melee arsenal lol.
Sure doesn’t compete but outright better at what it should do than rest of weapons.
Flamesword, literally zero syngergies
1hd sword is okaish but why you want anti infantry when most staffs are amazing at dealing with hordes
flail is stagger oriented with few single attack it do its job but lack of damage compared to poker
dagger is okay have some good moveset but have way lower dps against armored and armored attacks are slower.
Only problem of crowbill is that very low cleave, yeah it could get little boost to cleave something more than 1 slave rat, but its fast enought to deal with most hordes, for hyper density you have staffs.
For crowbill, I don’t know. I wouldn’t hate it, but Sienna does have horde clear in spades with her staffs. What if her last light attack had flail’s old CC explosion? She is a wizard, but would that be thematic or useful, or be too much?
I agree with this general take, but don’t know how I feel about making this change for 1h axes as well as crowbill. By the way, is a chaos raider the fanatics, or the marauders? Cause cleaving a marauder is rather a lot of cleave.
I say give 1h axes a bit more cleave like you suggest, but do something different with crowbill. The design of the weapon to me says it should firstly have shield piercing on pretty much all its attacks. From there I’d either make it a bit faster, and or do a little more damage. Sienna real does have AoE in spades, so I see no reason crowbill needs cleave to be worthwhile.
The 1h axe is better because it was buffed in the Aug. 2020 BBB / Patch 3.1, while the Crowbill didn’t receive any tweaks:
Axe
Speed
Attack
Speed
Light 1
0.58s → 0.53s
Light 2
0.53s → 0.48s
Light 3
0.9s → 0.72s
Push Attack
0.98s → 1.03s
Heavy 1
1.13s → 1.03s
Heavy 2
1.13s → 1.03s
Damage
Attack
Armor
Target
Body
Crit
Head
Crit&Head
Heavy (1, 2)
superarmor
1
23.87 (25%)
35.81 (25%)
35.81 (25%)
47.75 (25%)
Heavy (1, 2)
monster
1
21.48 (15%)
33.42 (15%)
27.45 (15%)
39.39 (15%)
Aside from increasing the weapon cleave, Fatshark should probably increase the attack speed to differentiate it further from the 1h axe. Prior to Patch 3.1, the Crowbill was supposed to be the “faster” 1h axe.
Increasing its cleave would only really help with UC’s thp, which is a separate issue, and dealing with weak infantry (unless it was a massive cleave buff). Sienna already deals with hordes well with range. I think it would be a better idea to make it better at single targets including monsters, the latter of which Sienna’s other melees are poor-to-okay for.
Buffing its attack speed would be a good compromise.
Mace is pretty much just superior to it atm. Crowbill gets 5% more dodge range but only 3 dodges, while Mace gets 4 which is more useful than 5% dodge range. Both deal with armour, Mace just also has stagger cleave attacks.
Definitely could use something, 1 added target might be the simplest thing to make it more relevant but maybe not the most “thematic” option.
Somehow I seem to recall his weapon being good/op in the past? Really cant remember from top of my head how it was previously so maybe take some of the stuff the weapon lost back from those days?
